, and, I am inclined to think, to sleeping
in the foul air of the dug-outs. The chief symptom is high
temperature, and the patient aches a good deal. I was sent back to
a place in the neighborhood of Arras and was there a week
recuperating.

While I was there a woman spy whom I had known in Abalaine was
brought to the village and shot. The frequency with which the duck
walk at Abalaine had been shelled, especially when ration parties
or troops were going over it, had attracted a good deal of
attention.

There was a single house not far from the end of that duck walk
west of Abalaine, occupied by a woman and two or three children.
She had lived there for years and was, so far as anybody knew, a
Frenchwoman in breeding and sympathies. She was in the habit of
selling coffee to the soldiers, and, of course, gossiped with them
and thus gained a good deal of information about troop movements.

She was not suspected for a long time. Then a gunner of a battery
which was stationed near by noticed that certain children's
garments, a red shirt and a blue one and several white garments,
were on the clothesline in certain arrangement on the days when
troops were to be moved along the duck walk the following night.
This soldier notified his officers, and evidence was accumulated
that the woman was signalling to the Boche airplanes.

She was arrested, taken to the rear, and shot. I don't like to
think that this woman was really French. She was, no doubt, one of
the myriad of spies who were planted in France by the Germans long
before the war.

After getting over the fever, I rejoined my battalion in the early
part of September in the Somme district at a place called Mill
Street. This was in reality a series of dug-outs along a road some
little distance behind our second lines, but in the range of the
German guns, which persistently tried for our artillery just beside
us.

Within an hour of my arrival I was treated to a taste of one of the
forms of German kultur which was new at the time. At least it was
new to me--tear gas. This delectable vapor came over in shells,
comparatively harmless in themselves, but which loosed a gas,
smelling at first a little like pineapple. When you got a good
inhale you choked, and the eyes began to run. There was no
controlling the tears, and the victim would fairly drip for a
long time, leaving him wholly incapacitated.

Goggles provided for this gas were nearly useless, and we all
resorted